CSA Week 6

Last week was a special week at the CSA. It was one of the few times we could have extra goodies delivered, and I also worked a shift. Working the closing shift meant picking up a few surplus items at the end which conveniently balanced out the fact that I stood in a downpour for two hours explaining what vegetables people were allotted.

Above, clockwise from left: giant scallions, cucumbers, beets with greens, peaches, romaine, farm fresh eggs, duck,
2 cheeses--Consider Bardwell's Pawlett, and 3 Corner Field Farm's Shushan Snow mini wheel of sheep's milk brie,
one heirloom tomato, chinese cabbage, white onions, and cilantro plants.

We were happy even to get one tomato what with all of this crazy late blight and thunderstorms in the northeast. We honored its delicious tomatoey flavor by slicing it and eating it for breakfrast with scrambled fresh eggs.

One of the onions and the whole bunch of beets with their greens got cubed, and saute-steamed--a fun process like sauteeing, but involving a total crowding and mild overflowing of the pan so that steam is trapped by food particles and ends up doing the cooking. We love to eat this with polenta. Inspired by this recipe, we've cut down on meat intake (aside from the duck we got this week) and left out the pancetta and made the whole meal into a two step process.

We ate the Chinese cabbage steamed with hoisin. I rarely feel in touch with my Chinese side, but man, when I ate this I felt so Asian and so right.

Cucumbers have been a real challenge since they're not a vegetable I'm particularly fond of and I can't cream braise them. Alas! We didn't eat either of them this week, but they are still holding up well in the fridge and I have grand plans for them and their newer brethren.

Delightful flowers! This is one fourth of a leftover flower share. A bunch of flowers four times this size every week would be too much for our household, but I forget how nice it is to have colorful things around sometimes.

We ate the peaches on their own and also in rose sangria. Some of them were the peaches of dreams, and some were mealy and flavorless. I should have stuck the mealy ones in some more booze to liven them up. You win some, you lose some.

The Shushan Snow Sheep's milk brie was rapidly consumed on a park bench with more of the sourdough onion rye bread I baked. Dappled sun, sitting, bread and cheese--life is made for these sweet moments.

Learning how to cut up a duck from the Joy of Cooking's excellent diagrams

We bought a duck because last summer I read Judith Jones's The Tenth Muse, and she describes buying a duck for herself and how she cooked and ate the different parts for her meals. It sounded lovely and delicious.

After cutting up this duck, we had:

• very fatty skin, which we cooked slowly to make cracklins and rendered duck fat (AMAZING, and possibly worth getting a duck for)
• a neck, two bony wings and a skeleton, which we made into stock
• a liver, a heart, and a gizzard, which got fried and put on a salad.
  
• two large breast pieces, which we broiled and served with chinese cabbage and orange chipotle sauce
• two legs with love handles attached, which got pan-braised with scallions
  

I had no qualms about cutting up this duck. I've always been freaked out by the plastic bag of gizzards that comes in a turkey, so I was very confused about my lack of nausea with duck bits. It was a similar to when I went skydiving with my friends after we graduated from high school; I was expecting a funny feeling in my tummy, but just felt inexplicably calm and peaceful the whole time. Maybe I felt okay with it because I had read the reassuring words of Ms. Jones so many times, "I consider the best cook's treats the packet of giblets one finds tucked into a roasting bird--and if you don't find it, complain loudly and never buy from that source again." These were very flavorful, not gross at all, and tasted amazing on a salad of fresh romaine. I doubt I'll seek out giblets to cook up, but when I do get another bird I'll be sure to make this recipe again.

Cracklins and rendered duck fat, however, I will crave for the rest of my life. Oh the sumptuous ducky flavor! Oh the smooth, barely solid lipid! Truly foods to make one feel richly fed.

The stock we have not consumed yet. I froze it in little labeled sandwich bags so that I can have a decent portion of stock to use rather than a whole pot-ful frozen altogether. I tasted an errant drop, and I am sure this stock will have the Midas touch on any food I cook with it.

With all of these parts so delicous, one would expect the meat to also be heavenly. It wasn't. I'm not sure why, but both times we cooked the duck (breast and leg) the meat was exceptionally tough. The preparation and cooking methods were vastly different from each other, but yielded the same disappointingly chewy result. Maybe next time we buy a duck we won't get such a vigorously exercised one.

Extreme Equipment: Hydration Vest

This product separates the ultralight wheat from the chaff. I am most decidedly in the chaff, preferring to have a little more weight for a hydration pack than to look like a camel-human-cyborg.

However, if you are really into cutting weight from your equipment or need a more aerodynamic water system, this item is on sale now at REI (25% off!).

CSA Week 5

Goodies, clockwise from top left: scallions, dill plant, red potatoes, bok choy, red russian kale,
two kohlrabis, red turnips, snap peas, blueberries. Not pictured: four giant cucumbers

I missed a few CSA updates since I was out of town for work, but both Jeff and our farmer assure me that the shares from early July were more of what I had seen before: root veggies, greens, and alliums (garlic/shallot/onion/green onion family). The weather has been rainy and cold--apparently this is the coldest July on record for the last 100 years--and that means our summer produce hasn't had the heat it needs to mature. However, I'm still happy getting the produce that is ready.

I'm not one to pick up a cucumber for a snack. In my mind they've long been relegated to the "scary vegetable" category. I eat them, yes, but usually when buffered by protective layers of rice or yogurt. So, to figure out how to eat 5 cucumbers (one left from the week before) was a real challenge. I scoured my brain for the few times I've actually gone to the store with "cucumbers" neatly penned under the produce section of my grocery list. The first thing that came to mind was my dear friend Jonathan's family recipe for tabbouleh; a great start and an excellent summer staple. Next to mind was tzatziki. We somehow stopped after that, leaving us with another 2 cucumbers to use up, but surely gin and tonics with cucumber-stick garnishes, and fresh pickles are on our horizon.

The scallions went into the aforementioned tabbouleh and tzatziki (eaten with homemade falafel), and also into a pan-fry with the kale. The red turnips got roasted, and somehow maintained their fibrous quality and zippy sting. As I do with failed vegetable endeavors, I might just cream braise those when I go to reheat the leftovers.

Kohlrabi got peeled, sliced and browned in butter. With a dash of old bay seasoning, this is surprisingly tasty. Bok choy, stems sliced, was lightly steamed and tossed with a little bit of oyster sauce. The snap peas were flash-boiled and intriguingly got packed into our lunches with homemade hummus and olive sourdough bread. Far from something I would think of myself, this proved to be a delicious epiphany.

The very best preparation we had this week were these skillet smashed potatoes. We ate them hot out of the pan with big dollops of sour cream and fleur de sel. They were, in a word, ecstatic.

The blueberries got eaten straight up and with yogurt. I'm hoping our next fruit share has more of them since I certainly still have an appetite for them.



[note: I have a few backlogged posts to share soon. There's really nothing like a week in Phoenix in July to sap your motivation... well, returning to work with jetlag is up there. I'll get the cherry post up here right quick.]

Trip Review: Southern Vermont

This review just kept getting shunted to the backburner, and for no good reason! The trip was fantastic.

An unexpected woodland pond, surely a playground for moose

Southern Vermont Weekend Trip Review

Background: A friend of ours who had never gone backpacking asked Jeff if we all could go sometime so he could see what we make a big fuss about. I think that was a Monday. By Wednesday night we had half-cooked a plan to go to Vermont. I had a strange work schedule that week which allowed me to both run down to Paragon Sports and pick up a map of Vermont and also to stop by my alma mater to borrow some extra equipment.

baby ferns unfurl in the new warmth

Transportation: Our dear friend Matt took the train to his parents house in New Jersey Thursday night to pick up his car, drove it back to the city, and we left after work on Friday June 5. Gas and tolls were about $60 altogether.

Our trail started just outside Bennington. Getting there (including time spent a little disoriented/lost in Vermont) took 3 and a half hours from northern Manhattan.

A calming view from the top of Glastonbury Mountain. Not a building in sight.

Trail Conditions: The only other people on the trails were through-hikers doing the Appalachian Trail. They are a varied group, and very odd people to share trails and lean-tos with. The weekend was gorgeous, sunny, clear, but not too hot yet. Matt had forgotten his sleeping bag and was moderately cold in his makeshift wrap of the tent's rain fly, a tarp, and his hammock.

Vermont is not extreme in its mountainry. When we summitted the 3748 foot mountain/hill above our second shelter and shimmied up the firetower, we were greeted with a very pleasant view of rolling verdant hills. It's the kind of scene that gives me peace in my soul, but does not necessarily suck the breath out of my lungs with awe. This is by no means an insult to Vermont. Anyone living in New York knows that peace in the soul is absolutely priceless.

The trails were bursting with new life. Trees, shrubbery, the forest floor, all were exuding nuanced shades of green. Frogs, moose, chipmunks and squirrels were as excited as I was. Unfortunately for me, the gnats were also out and about and quite thrilled to have me around as a snack.

As we started hiking on Saturday morning, I giggled with glee at an exciting discovery:

ramps were growing everywhere. (They are the elongated leaves above)

I immediately harvested a few untrampled specimens, shook off the dirt and tied them to my pack.

At dinner, I rinsed them off, gave them a rough chop, sauteed them in olive oil, and tossed them into our pasta.

Food:

Breakfast
10 packets oatmeal--a little short of the 12 I should have rationed. My only excuse is not being used to planning food for 4.

Lunch/Snacks/Emergency Rations
1/2 jar of peanut butter
10 tortillas

1 large tub of hummus
1 gal. homemade GORP
1/2 lb. parmegiano reggiano (mostly used for dinner, but also eaten as "cheese flakes" for lunch)

I think most people would be happy to eat this at home, let alone in a beautiful forest after a good day of hiking. It's no harder to make on the trail than boxed mac & cheese, so why not?

Dinner
1 lbs. Barilla Plus angel hair/thin spaghetti

1 packet Knorr creamy pesto sauce
1/2 c pine nuts [as I've said before: bad for dieting, great for backpacking]
pint-container olives in olive oil
foraged ramps

CSA Week 2

In our CSA share for the second week, we got the following delightful treats (clockwise from bottom left)

garlic scapes, scallions, basil plant, dandelion greens, strawberries,

lance-leaf kale, red romaine, japanese turnips, and snow peas

The kale, along with week 1's swiss chard went into a modified version of one of my favorite dishes: giant chipotle white beans. Jeff and I modified it by using black beans we had cooked a few days before, and 2 bunches of greens.

Snow peas, along with store bought Jersey Fresh fava beans and sweet peas, became spring vegetables with parmesan curls and citrus vinaigrette.

Breaking out of the same vein of slow-fermenting sourdough with part whole-wheat, part unbleached all-purpose flour, I opened the Macrina Cookbook and found this gem: Onion Rye Bread

I think it's worth buying the book for, it is that delicious. It doesn't hurt that it's a pretty easy bread to bake.

Our spring onions/scallions went into onion-rye sourdough bread--a serious contender for best thing I've ever baked. Also the loaf was enormous, the size of a newborn child. I whipped up some garlic scape pesto which went smashingly with the bread, but did give me terrible breath when I ate it at work for lunch.

The turnips waited a long time for their turn and then got cream-braised with their greens, sliced onion, garlic, and a couple more scapes. Their flavor was almost exactly like a steamed broccoli stem, but they had a soft texture that simply melted in the mouth. Cream-braising is really the best way to cook a vegetable you're not sure about. It makes everything scrumptious and irresistable.

We ate about 1/3 of the strawberries plain, and then churned the rest into some amazing strawberry frozen yogurt. As the weather finally starts to feel like summer here, this is a very welcome addition to our kitchen. Note: if you have an abundance of fruit that's, err, well, approaching an untimely demise, macerate it! That word always makes me think I should put stuff in a mortar and pestle and grind it to a pulp, but no--you should wash and cut your fruit, put it in a bowl, coat with sugar, and a bit of alcohol. After you let it sit for a while the color picks up, and the flavor intensifies. You can learn a bit more about the hows and whys the same way I did, by reading Lynne Rossetto Kasper's thoughts (and iced peaches recipe) here.

Our lesson from the first week was to just add more vegetables to every meal. We washed and cut the dandelion greens and romaine to have quick salads with each dinner until they got eaten up. I think in large part due to our increase in veggie consumption, I'm feeling extremely healthy of late, despite the fact that my level of exercise hovers ever-so-slightly above zero.